Google makes finding pirated material harder with algorithm tweak

A vinyl mural attached to the scaffolding wrapping around Google's New York headquarters in Chelsea along Eighth Avenue is seen on April 10. The cartoons on the 450-by- 4-foot mural were drawn by Mark Miller and Dave Franzese of the Brooklyn design studio Dark Igloo. Jack Kerouac, who wrote “On the Road” at the Hotel Chelsea is included in the mural as is Major Thomas Clark, who named the neighborhood in the 1700s. The scaffolding and mural will be up through the end of May.

Those of you downloading episodes of Girls illegally, beware: Google is changing up its search algorithm to make it harder to find pirated material.

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

According to the Atlantic Wire, Google's been processing more copyright claims than ever before, and thus can determine which sites are repeat offenders and deserve to be punished.

A Google spokesperson told TPM in a statement that “we will only be counting valid copyright removal notices, submitted under penalty of perjury by copyright owners, that meet our takedown criteria.”

For those of you interested, Google also already publishes a list of those domains that have received “valid” copyright removal requests in the past month and year: extratorrent.com and torrenthound.com lead the list.